Rather than arguing against the current strategy or defending its budget share, the Army should counterattack by rethinking its fundamental purpose, what political scientist Samuel Huntington called a “strategic concept,” or a description of how and when the service expects to protect the nation.

When a service lacks a relevant concept, he said, “it becomes purposeless, it wallows about amid a variety of conflicting and confusing goals, and ultimately it suffers both physical and moral degeneration.”

Huntington wrote these words 50 years ago to portray the US Navy after World War II, but they accurately describe the Army in the aftermath of Afghanistan and Iraq. Like today’s Army, the Navy of the 1950s faced an identity crisis. It had been forged by the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who advocated controlling the seas by annihilating an enemy’s fleet.

But after 1945, the Navy had nearly uncontested dominion over the sea. Navy leadership had to justify the enormous expense of maintaining a global fleet to control the seas when no adversary plausibly challenged US control.

The Navy’s answer was to change its strategic concept. Rather than seeking to defeat enemy fleets at sea, the Navy chose to exploit its control of the oceans to help win wars on land. This shift provided the strategic framework for building a fleet designed to address the central problem of the Cold War — deterring and defeating Soviet ground forces — through sea-based strikes, amphibious warfare, nuclear ballistic-missile submarines and rapid reinforcement of NATO land forces.

Today, it is the Army leadership that must justify the cost of maintaining a force that is sized and shaped to fight and win two major land campaigns, at a time when even one major land war seems improbable and defense budgets are declining. A new strategic concept could help the Army halt its downward trend while providing critical future capabilities.

Seeing more and more calls for this kind of change. That's good.